Future Chips: Headed for Heat Problems

SAN FRANCISCO -- Processors may easily reach speeds from 10 GHz to 30 GHz in the next ten years, but there is one very large problem: Using today's technology, that kind of speed will make them way too hot to handle. Literally.

If engineers keep building processors the way they do now, CPUs will get even faster but they'll require so much power that they won't be usable, says Patrick Gelsinger, vice president and chief technical officer of Intel. He discussed the issue at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference here Monday.

Gelsinger noted, tongue in cheek, that by 2005 high-speed processors will be as hot as a "nuclear reactor." In 2010 they'll hit "rocket nozzle" extremes, and by 2015 they'll be as hot as "the surface of the sun."

If processors are to continue to grow more powerful every year, engineers must find a way to boost speed without always adding more power, he said.

Speed Was Easy

To keep processor speeds charging upward over the years, Intel has improved the architecture of each chip, increased the die size, and cranked up the power, Gelsinger said.

"We got better at dialing up frequency and we did it aggressively," he said.

However, while each generation of chip was faster, it was bigger and required still more power. Over the years, new heat sinks and fans made it possible to keep those ever-warming processors cool. But those techniques won't work in the future, he said.

"We don't know how to cool a 5000-watt processor," he said. Besides, even if bigger fans and heat sinks were to work, people want smaller desktops and notebooks, not larger ones, he said.

The key is to squeeze more processing power out of each watt a chip uses, Gelsinger said. That's the task before the engineers, many of whom were at the conference. Solutions being explored include low-power transistors, the use of multithread CPUs, new L2 caches, and even multiple CPUs on a single die, he said.

Regardless of what method succeeds, Intel expects to maintain Moore's Law, Gelsinger said. Intel cofounder Gordon Moore predicted in 1971 that the number of transistors residing on a sliver of silicon will double every two years. His statement has held since the 4004 processor, which had 2300 transistors--by the end of this decade, that number should reach well into the billions.

All That Power

Today we measure processor performance in millions of instructions per second (MIPS), but we'll measure future chips in TIPS, or tera (meaning 1 trillion) instructions per second, Gelsinger said. He expects that future desktop PCs will handle the processing chores of today's ultraexpensive supercomputers.

People wonder what we'll do with all that processing power, but Gelsinger said there is no shortage of good ideas. Future processors will be more adept at handling processor-intensive chores such as network communications, encryption, speech to text, natural language processing, and even three-dimensional gesture recognition. Most importantly, there will be an evolution in how we interact with our PCs.

"The man-machine interface will change," he said. "Today we adapt, later they will."